Slightly off-topic here, since your post doesn’t require the conflation, but it has been annoying me lately that there are three distinct usages of “empathy” that are frequently conflated.
1) “Empathy” as the emotional interest in others, could also be called “moral sense”, the kind of empathy that sociopaths are said to lack.
2) “Empathy” as the ability to identify emotionally with others, the set of instincts or “firmware” that make interpersonal communications and interactions go smoothly, the kind of empathy that autistics are said to lack.
3) “Empathy” or “imaginative identification with others”, a more intellectual version, part of the definition of an intelligent being which is associated with metalaw. The ability to intellectually and purposely imagine yourself in the place of another, even a very different other, such as an extra-terrestrial alien, hence its association with metalaw.
Much of what I cut was Prinz going on about the fine details like that; your and his distinctions did not interest me very much, and your definitions are incorrect/not commonly accepted, anyway. (How does a word coined only in 1903 pick up those 3 meanings anyway?)
It seems to me that billswift is accurately identifying three different meanings the word ‘empathy’ is taken to have. I’d never heard of metalaw before, though.
Slightly off-topic here, since your post doesn’t require the conflation, but it has been annoying me lately that there are three distinct usages of “empathy” that are frequently conflated.
1) “Empathy” as the emotional interest in others, could also be called “moral sense”, the kind of empathy that sociopaths are said to lack.
2) “Empathy” as the ability to identify emotionally with others, the set of instincts or “firmware” that make interpersonal communications and interactions go smoothly, the kind of empathy that autistics are said to lack.
3) “Empathy” or “imaginative identification with others”, a more intellectual version, part of the definition of an intelligent being which is associated with metalaw. The ability to intellectually and purposely imagine yourself in the place of another, even a very different other, such as an extra-terrestrial alien, hence its association with metalaw.
Much of what I cut was Prinz going on about the fine details like that; your and his distinctions did not interest me very much, and your definitions are incorrect/not commonly accepted, anyway. (How does a word coined only in 1903 pick up those 3 meanings anyway?)
It seems to me that billswift is accurately identifying three different meanings the word ‘empathy’ is taken to have. I’d never heard of metalaw before, though.